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It hurts. Her body burns. Floor lays and stays absolutely still. Some instinctual part of her says 'stay down' and another screams 'hold your breath' and so she does. She can feel fire. It expands all around her, it burns her and chaffs and she is breathing in spikes. Rocket is screaming, Lylla is still. She can't hear anything, she can hear everything.
Floor wonders if her fur is supposed to be red, a smell of burning hits her. But everyone is running, everyone is chasing. They all leave, and she can smell blood, so much blood. Eventually, the instincts stop. She is allowed to jerk, suddenly awake from her prey brain freezing her onto her side. Her chest hurts. She can't look down and see it, her eyes are unable to see before her nose. Floor waves her paws, the only ones she's ever had, she touches her chest, right below her dewlap.
There's a dent. A hard indented area, and her paws come back red. She understands blood. She exhales, then feels nothing but sadness. Rocket is gone. She clicks across the room and pokes Lylla first, then Teefs. They are not Floor. Lylla's eyes are staring at a sky that Floor cannot see when she looks upward. Thought it does make her think. She looks back down. Teefs is gone as well. He stares off, never blinking again. Floor sees how huge he is, and knows he could never fly. Perhaps she could, perhaps Lylla, but Teefs is massive. Rocket had explained flying. It wasn't for heavy animals, or even heavy people.
She thinks the plan couldn't possibly work with anyone big. That the small animals had a better chance. Floor thinks that is unfair to Teefs. That all of this is unfair, but most of all that he might have never escaped with them.
She was always a little scared of him before. She feels nothing but sadness now. Were she able to cry, or even given that ability, she might. She opens and closes her metal mouth, she nudges them, hoping if she pulls them with her steel jaws or nudges them hard enough, they will wake. The gunfire is distant, she stares at the puddle of blood beyond Lylla. The man's long gone, but he will return.
Her first moments outside of the cage of her own free will, and they're terrible. Her friends are dead, Rocket might be dead as well, and if he isn't dead, he must feel the same as Floor. They are alive, and the people they love are dead. It hurts.
Floor touches the hard metal of her chest, the fur lain over it bleeds from the hole. She looks around her. At all the animals she barely knows the names of, let alone if they have names which are not numbers. She presses a long leg into the wall and it keeps. She pulls herself vertically and moves over the masses. She is almost now a Ceiling instead of a Floor.
It's not a great experience, she has never climbed before, only jumped and hopped about. She finds it slightly uncomfortable but her mechanical legs keep her able to go up. She makes a loop of the room, then eats. Her metal jaws grab the food pellets they feed them in little bags. It's all the nutrition, not flavor. She goes up the wall and into the ceiling. There are tiles that move. She pushes in, then hides any proof she ever moved them.
Floor is wallowing in her complicated feelings when she hears yelling.
She cannot see below the panels but she can hear the scraping of mechanical limbs upon the wall, of bodies being dragged. “There's supposed to be three, ain't there?” A worker asks.
“I guess.”
“He said otter, rabbit, walrus.”
“Mmhmm.”
But nobody says anything more until Floor hears the wet splot of a mop against the floor. The chemicals have always burned her sensitive rabbit nose and she is all but tired. She has survived but doesn't feel okay with surviving. Lylla had welcomed them all when they were babies, had been there. Now she is not. Teefs had been big but growing when he came. But Floor? Floor is all that remains.
“I haven't been in this room much, far as I remember it was just the raccoon in that cage.”
Floor's life is dismissed as quickly as it is brought up. When there is only silence, she does peer down through a nudged panel. It is like they never were there, she realizes. Because there's no blood on the floor anymore, the cages are cleaned of all but the scratches and nicks they left upon its walls and floor. It sits barren and while not sparkling, Floor cannot say it looks like what she once hid inside. She almost thinks it is not where she has spent her younger years.
It is a horrible feeling, to no longer see their bodies.
It feels final.
It feels like goodbye.
Floor retreats to grieve.
By afternoon, Floor eats again, though genetically altered, she still needs food. Rabbits will die if they do not eat at least once every eight hours, but Floor is not a normal rabbit. She is aware of what she is the soonest, because they called her a dumb rabbit many times. She knows when they burn the bodies they won't tell their boss that they're missing a rabbit. Humans and animals are incinerated. It is the only time they are equal here.
Floor knows this because that's what she hears for two days while wandering the ceiling. Nobody ever looks for her, nobody cares to look for her. The hole in her fur closes with a rough scab, she wants to clean the area, but has to resist the wound itching. Lylla hates when she removes scabs. But there is no Lylla. Floor respects her deceased friend's wishes anyway.
She finds it easy to sleep, but hard to stay asleep. She makes due with naps. Her mind cannot fully understand her own feelings.
“I can't believe he escaped.” One person says and Floor crouches and finally listens to something interesting. Most of the humans just complain. “And he wants us to find him.”
“Fat chance.”
“He could be anywhere by now.”
“Who taught him how to fly a ship?”
They all grumble. But it's relegated to 'not our job to worry' and they return to feeding animals and jabbing veins with the chemicals to warp them further.
Rocket. He flew. He is out there, flying. Floor feels joy. The incinerator was missing a raccoon. She spins in a circle when their noises are loud enough to hide her tapping. She manages fairly well, actually. She can imagine with her mind all sorts of things. What a ship might look like, how grass might feel, and how the wind might even feel.
Rocket is flying.
Floor is alive.
These are both good things. They are sad, happy, and all kinds of feelings types of things. Floor doesn't believe she will see him again, but she believes she can keep on living. Nobody will even remember her because they are on Batch 91, people get swapped out or die. She will live and she will wait. One day everything will be okay. Right now everything is okay. One of her friends still lives. Floor draws the shape of Rocket on the wall with the sharp point of her leg. Then she draws the sky as she imagines it. Her mechanical legs are very coordinated. They scrape simple lines and make Rocket and the sky simple, just like her.
But it is beautiful.
It will be okay.